


Prologue

by Aithilin



Series: Dreamwalkers of Eos [6]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Dreamwalking, M/M, Pre-Canon, alternate universe - dreamwalking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-11
Packaged: 2019-08-21 18:20:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16581650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aithilin/pseuds/Aithilin
Summary: Ardyn was the first dreamwalker of Eos, it had helped him escape his prison.





	1. Chapter 1

The first time he died, it was in the cold and dark stone prison of Angelgard. It was with the hooks and chains piercing through still human muscle and skin; iron scraping against bone. He remembered the blinding haze of the pain, the words of his brother echoing in the chamber around him— that narrow, forgotten space. The incessant drip of fluid on the stone piercing through the silence, as his pain-filled haze cleared in the last moments to understand that it was his blood dripping. His own heart spilling out to the ground around where the wounds pierced him— held him, chained him. 

After that, dying was easy. 

It was the slow, delicate embrace of an old friend. It was the calm beckoning to a warm bed. 

He died of thirst, hunger, cold, heat. 

And he woke again, whole and chained and healthy, doomed to waste away. 

In the first few years, he cried out for the gods. For the goddess— for Etro, whom he had always honoured, who he commissioned statues to, even as he undid her work in his healings. He begged the Astrals each time he stumbled from life through their doorstep— to that void of nothing, where his very being rebelled against the Scourge that was festering inside him. He felt it seeping out over the ages. He felt the wounds tearing open as he struggled from time to time— his corruption seeping out into the world through the shadows and into the night. 

He returned time and again to the growls and scrapes of claws on the stone prison. Watched his creatures— his hated, broken, malicious twists of his power— skittering to the shadows as the daylight pierced through the narrow prison. He watched the doorway as they slipped out into the night— selfish, cunning beasts he no longer had the will to reabsorb. 

He envied their freedom as he died again, and again, and watched the light cross the ground outside. 

He envied the Astrals their freedom to be selfish, self-absorbed, masters in their own corruption. He envied his brother’s sanctimonious swagger and declarations. His usurper brother. As if he wouldn’t have shared the kingdom when it was his to share. 

The light came and went. The splattering of rain violent and vile against his prison walls. The briny air of the sea choking him with its salt. 

It was years (he assumed) before he started to dream.

Before he remembered what dreaming was. Before each new darkness wasn’t just tipping over into the void of death. 

The cold rust of the chains scraped through muscle and skin and dragged along bone. And he dreamt dreams twisted by the Scourge he once healed in so many. 

The next time he died, he begged the Astrals to let the nightmares end. 

When the words appeared on the slanted, prison walls, Ardyn thought he was dreaming. 

The words shifted and changed— a greeting at first— dripped like paint from one line to the next, and faded as he read. He recognised his own scrawl in them, imagined holding the pen and dipping the nib to watery ink— the consistency wrong, like when he was first learning to mix the pigments. He used to flick the excess at Somnus when his brother teased him for the mess. 

And the words shifted, and dripped, and rippled with the water. 

_You must be lonely._

When he saw the creature, Ardyn dismissed it. He knew an Astral when he saw one. His daemon blood riled in response. The bitterness burning in the back of his throat like bile, like the ichor of the Scourge, had him struggle against the attentions of an Astral— a mocking little creature come to torment him. He twisted in his prison until the chains cut and bled and chipped away at the marrow of him. Until Scourge and daemon dripped from him. 

The Astral, unlike its brethren, seemed undisturbed by his corruption seeping towards it. 

_Would you like to dream?_

He screamed for Etro in the void. Begged her to wake and end this farce. To banish her mocking sibling and right the wrongs committed against him. 

He woke to the creature watching him, a soft light radiating from the ruby on its head, small paws moving inches above the blood and Scourge seeping into the holy ground to defile the sanctuary of Angelgard. 

The light washed over him in the narrow prison, the clawing, cloying darkness skittering back to the corners of the stone room as the little creature joined him. 

“Please,” he thought he said— throat dry, scratched, cracked; “free me.”

_I can’t. Would you like to dream?_

“Yes.”

He expected to dream of his brother. 

He expected to see the distant city he had helped build, the fragile little kingdom of Lucis he had unified with his healing. He had expected to see that stolen black throne— the marble steps of the dais he and Somnus had designed together, drawn out with watery ink. He expected to see Somnus— smug in his victory— or in childhood vision. 

He saw Lucis. 

Ardyn opened his eyes in his dreams, and stood in a field, where gralua wandered win a slow herd, and a rancher on a chocobo guided them away from a fence. He knew it was Lucis by the colour of it, the green of it. The harvest browns had not yet set it, but the colourful spring was already far behind them. He was the rancher, his chocobo the black bird he once rode across the same fields to heal people who gathered in places like this to meet him. He could feel the wind, untouched by sea salt air, and sun around him, though there were clouds on the horizon. 

And the little creature followed him. 

He walked the long roads of Lucis again— wandered the ageless hills and wetlands, and found the ruins of Solheim he had once visited now overgrown and vacant. He watched the sky bleed to endless seas of stars, and the Lucian people travel beneath the starlight in peace. 

When he woke, it was for a moment only. 

The little Astral still sat, undisturbed by the skittering shadows born of the Scourge around it. 

“More,” he tried to whisper in the dark, the stars blocked from his view in his small, narrow prison. “Please, more.”

The throne rested with strangers when he saw it. He dismissed those visions as he wandered, the little creature chirping at his side in soft, encouraging trills. He found forests and lakes, tombs hidden behind forest glades and the face of peaceful Etro flanking each doorway. He found farms and fishing villages, and turned away from the great stretch of cursed stone wings on the water that made up his prison. He watched the sun set from the peaks of Ifrit’s burial mound, and watched the waves crash against the rocky shores of Caem. He found rare flowers in Leide, peeking through the dry dusts. 

And he wondered at all that he saw. 

_You must be lonely._ His little friend said once, words vanishing from the stars with the winds. 

“No,” he lied, as he watched his dream of Lucis come alive around him. “No, I’m not.”

The dreams were interrupted by death— one slipped to the other without any fanfare or ceremony. He clung to the dreams, as they dissolved to the void. As he was lost in forests, or at the edges of towns rising and falling with the years. He begged the little creature— the only kind Astral he had known— to interfere and intervene. To let the dreams last. 

To let the dreams follow him into death. 

The little creature would simply sit, and watch as the visions dissolved. _I’ll be here when you get back._


	2. Chapter 2

Manipulating the dreams came with practice. 

Ardyn learnt by following the little Astral through each new land; fields and forests shifted beneath small grey paws and ethereal ruby light. He watched, and learnt, and stepped lightly through the dreams that took him far away from the web of chains and crystalline torment. He made clouds— mourning dark and heavy with pain dissipate to endless blue skies, and called shadows to comfort him in the twisting, half-lucid moments of waking between bouts of study. 

He wandered Eos, and watched it change. 

He watched Lucis grow under a lie. Thrive in its royal deception. 

So he changed what he could, where he could. He learnt that rain meant that he was waking up— that pain was close at hand. He learnt that he could travel deeper, and the visions presented to him could be marked or masked or manipulated to lose his little companion. 

Most importantly, Ardyn learnt that others dreamt just as he did. 

He had never visited Galahd— the quiet island nation that seemed to have little interest in who he was or what he was doing— but he had now been there all the same. He now knew every forest and canyon and river. He knew that there were bleeding veins of gold and ruby beneath its mountains, and there were dark caves deep in its canyons. He knew now that there were places, delicate and ethereal in the forests and river basins, that connected the waking life to dreams. 

And he now knew that Carbuncle guarded them. 

He watched the little altars built to the little Astral beckon and glimmer in his dreams. They were unchangeable; static as a fixed point to connect the men and women and children who travelled to them. Their candles burned, their offerings left, and Ardyn watched acolytes trace messages on the walls of stone. Their clothes changed as they came— fashions changed, children grew old and brought children of their own. He heard their introductions as if he was a king here, in these little caverns, accompanying the fluffy little Astral to his den. 

He never bothered to learn the faces, the names, the pleas that echoed through the dark chambers. But he watched, and waited, and learnt. 

When he grew bored of someone or another, he wandered through their dreams. He made the shadows growl and namesake wolves appear. He haunted— bitter and pained— as the rain beat through the pleasant dreamscape the savage clan leaders were trying to build around them. He took them on journeys of his own— showed them the Scourge that clawed its way around them unseen in waking life. 

He smiled when they resisted. When they carved beads and charms and named him “nightmare” against the light of his teacher. 

He smiled as they knew him. 

On the good days, when he rested in the shadows, or wandered the wide world built around him, he felt the sun and warm winds on his skin. He watched sunrises and sets within hours of each other, and watched as the world of the waking infected the world of dreams he was building. He studied his Scourge— his loyal little companions lurking, seething, swimming in the shadows around him at all times. He called them from their void and endured the chains that his brother caught him with. He listened, in dreams, as the world changed— vehicles and roads and wars all arrived at once. 

On the bad days— the days of beating rain and cold winds that seeped into his scarred bones— he lashed out at the supplicants pleading for the nightmares to end. He imagined they were begging him, not Carbuncle. He imagined that the darkness growling from the edge of their reality, in these hidden portals of the world was his own real power— that they knew his name and understood who he was. That they would call him king and release him from his prison. 

It was the Ulrics who were trouble. They bred warriors, not walkers. Priests, rather than supplicants cowering at shadows. He saw them carving their charms from his shadows, and saw the favour Carbuncle once gave to him shifting. 

When the Ulrics came to the little cave deep in the canyon, Ardyn waited, and watched. Now he remembered their names; he likened them to his brother. Usurpers. A clan of thieves.

And all of a sudden, the world shifted. 

He was woken, by forbidden voices. Real voices. He was woken by light and noise, and the crushing weight of reality around him brought by soldiers wearing gleaming white uniforms. The sanctity of his prison shattered like his dreamscape. The silence of his isolation torn apart by the red flares and whine of machines he barely understood. Yet.

As they released him, stole the dripping Scourge from him in little glass tubes, he watched, and waited. 

And introduced himself when he could. 

With a smile, and blood, and a body crushed beneath his newly acquired boot as he read their dreams and understood that they thought they could use him for their own gain. 

When he woke, returned from the endless void with a bullet wound healed, he relished the fear in the eyes of the commoners now skittering to the shadows with his daemons. With the rest of his pets. 

“Ardyn Izunia,” the name of an Ulric usurper fell easily from blackened lips and he could smell their fear as he claimed their plans for his own; “at your service.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a direct prologue to [Dreamers](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11301615?view_full_work=true)

You must be lonely.

Immortality was a strange thing. Ardyn had watched with impartial disinterest as people died around him. As a scientist he barely bothered to remember droned on about the nature of the Scourge Ardyn was much more familiar with. He watched people age in life, and age in their dreams, as the crushing weight of the Niflheim snow subdued their ambitions to mere war games. 

They wanted conquest. 

He wanted death. 

He learnt the history of the world, and let it fester in him. He spent endless nights reading about his new enemies— a kingdom stolen, though he vaguely remembers thinking that he would have shared it. The passage of time meant nothing in the context, but he pretended to marvel, all the same. 

And he learnt of the little prince deep in the heart of the Lucian kingdom, apparently favoured by the gods. 

So he taught his new allies how to kill the gods. 

When the prince was hurt, and sleeping, Ardyn visited him in his forest. In the lush greenery the childish mind conjured to protect itself. He heard the birdsong conjured in the trees, and felt the warmth of golden summer sun through the rustle of broad leaves. The grass was soft, but as he walked the boy’s dream, he caught flashes of reality— burning rubber and oil and screams of twisted metal, blood fresh on the ground, and the starry night sky blotted out by thick, choking smoke. 

“Hello.”

The boy was all smiles and big blue eyes. Ardyn saw Somnus in him. 

“Hello,” he answered with a smile of his own, kneeling down to see the child properly. “Who are you?”

“I’m Noctis.”

“Hello, Noctis.” There was trust there. In those Lucian blue eyes. “Do you know where you are?”

A small shake of the boy’s head and Ardyn let himself smile. He offered his hand when he stood, and dispelled the creeping shadows from the boy’s dream; “Then let’s get you home.” 

The boy followed him deeper into the woods, where the darkness started to creep in. A small hand clutched his tighter and Ardyn slowed his pace for the boy to keep up. He listened as the boy told him about fireflies and fish, and the sea of stars he had seen before the twisted metals and black smoke. He smiled and nodded as the boy shifted closer in the dark, as the path grew narrow. 

“Now, don’t be frightened,” he said, when the dark started to close in and the forest started to seep away into black. As he conjured growling creatures in the brush, with yellow eyes and fanged grins; “these are just nightmares, boy.”

The boy ran. And Ardyn let him. 

His nightmares had already seeped into the festering wound on the boy’s back and leg. His mark already left on the boy’s mind. 

As he woke to the reality of his plans, he thought about that boy. The little Lucis Caelum prince— favoured by the traitorous gods. There were prophecies and plans, all dull and standard affairs. But the child was already chosen by the accursed Crystal hidden in the fortress of Lucis. 

No one else in Eos knew what it was to be chosen by the Crystal, but Ardyn. Chosen and cast aside for corruption caused by doing what he was bid. Perhaps when the boy was older, he could be corrupted too. The last of the Lucis Caelum bastards, cast aside by the very Crystal that insisted on forcing a prophecy to come to light. He could be made to rebel against the fate laid out for him, infected already with the Scourge and usurper’s blood. 

Ardyn listened to the Niflheim rulers drone on, and on. 

And planned how he could beckon his darling nephew to either his side, or the prison in Angelgard.


End file.
